Ibrahim Al-Marashi

Ibrahim Al-Marashi received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He is Associate Professor of Middle East History at California State University San Marcos, and an advisory board member of the International Security and Conflict Resolution (ISCOR) program at San Diego State University (SDSU), as well as an adjunct lecturer at its School of Public Health. He is also a guest lecturer at John Cabot University in Rome, Catholic University of Milan and in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego and the Department of Political Science at University of San Diego. He is the co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (2008), The Modern History of Iraq (2016), and A Concise History of the Middle East (2024).

He is a scholar who is best known for his University of Oxford doctoral dissertation on the 1991 Gulf War. Tony Blair’s government plagiarized parts of Chapter Two of his thesis to sway members of parliament and the British media to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even former US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented that “dodgy dossier” as evidence in front of the entire UN General Assembly. The affair is described in Al-Marashi’s TEDx talk, “The Dodgy Dossier, the Iraq War, and Me.”

After that incident Al-Marashi became an academic as well as a regular writer of opinion essays. His 2003 New York Times essay, “Just Following Saddam Hussein’s Orders,” was the first of more than 200 published since then, ranging from the London Times to The Guardian, from the Huffington Post to The Kyiv Post in Ukraine, and he is a regular contributor to Al-Jazeera English. A sample of his most widely read essays include his 2019 Washington Post article on antisemitism in San Diego county, “The Poway Shooter Used an Aged Old Terrorist Tactic,” a 2023 San Francisco Chronicle reflection on one of the first American officers to die in Iraq in 2003, “Victims of War are more than just a Statistic,” and his January 2024 Time magazine piece, “History Suggests U.S. Airstrikes Against the Houthis Will Backfire,” He also writes about local stories that have global, or in this case planetary ramifications, such as his San Diego Union Tribune piece about Ellen Ochoa, the first Latinx-American astronaut and the building named in her honor at the SDSU campus.